About Us

Background

We started out as a small brewery based on Baylands Drive in Newlands, Wellington, in a double garage. We know it’s a bit cliché starting a business in the garage, but it worked well for us and was a great opportunity to get to know all the neighbours.

Baylands Brewery is the passion of Aidan Styles and Steve & Kim Young. Adam Robieson & James Shanly recently joined the team as our Assistant Brewers.

Aidan has a background in IT. After 22 years in a shirt and tie he traded up to shorts and a t-shirt to follow his passion and make beer.

Aidan has always been one of those kiwi blokes who like to tinker in the garage on different projects. After tinkering with race cars, then hunting, then tramping, he started tinkering with making home brew beer. His passion quickly expanded and the area set aside for his hobby got bigger and bigger. The space for the cars quickly ran out as more and more pots and fridges arrived. More and more friends wanted to drink his homebrew and it started getting really really popular.

In November 2012 we converted one side of the garage into a commercial brewery and we ordered a brew kit from China that would fit in the garage.

Steve and Aidan used to work together. Steve also shared Aidan’s passion for making beer and so we joined forces.

We launched our brewery at Goldings Free Dive, a craft beer bar in Wellington in May 2013.

We had been solely producing kegs until we made our put our Enforcer Black IPA and Woodrow's Veto IPA into cans. We started a bottle range in August 2015.

Home brew store

We also have an online homebrew store. This brew store has a fantastic history of successful brewers. It started with Stu McKinley from Yeastie Boys, who handed it over to Joe Wood from Liberty Brewing. When Joe was getting ready to move to Auckland he offered the business to us.

The home brew supply store is run as part of the brewery business, offering the same quality ingredients we use, to home brewers across the country. We enjoy engaging with and being able to give advice and support to home brewers of all levels of experience. It wasn’t too long ago that we were home brewers as well.

Having outgrown the garage, we took a leap of faith and expanded from our 300 litre garage brewery to a 1200 litre brewery in a warehouse in Petone.

The brewery and brew store are on Victoria Street in the thriving part of Petone. .

Our aim is to make the brewery somewhere people are proud of and feel like we are part of the Petone community.

Awards and achievements

Our Van Da Tsar Russian Imperial Stout was ranked the number one beer in the Beervana 2015 application. Our Schwheat As Wheat Beer was number four in the odd beer list.

We have been lucky enough to win some significant awards including the Malthouse West Coast IPA Challenge People's Choice two years in a row. In 2014 we won it for our Rock Solid beer. In 2013 it was for a beer we made with home brewer Ryan Crawford as part of New Zealand Amateur Brewer competition.

We came second in the Emerging Brewery in the nationwide Society of Beer Advocates (SOBA) awards in 2013.

Our Black is Black beer won the People's Choice at the SOBA Winter Ale festival in 2014 and in 2013 our Berry Brownie got second.

We won five medals at the 2014 Brewers Guild of New Zealand Awards, 3 awards in 2015, 3 in 2016 and 7 medals in 2017. Details of these are on the Our Beer page.

In 2014, Consumer magazine tested home brew kits. Our wort pack came out on top against some pretty impressive competition that we used to brew with when we were starting out as home brewers.